Rainforest Powers QA with Human Testers

Rainforest, QA solution provider, uses the power of humans to test website quality. The Rainforest API allows developers to programmatically trigger the execution of tests. Rainforest finds that nothing tests a user interface like a good old-fashioned human being. Thus, users set up tests in plain English and Rainforest takes the customer through the steps of the tests.

"Why did we build Rainforest? QA sucks. But we all have to do it. Like payments pre-Stripe, QA is a process that every developer hates. Yet for some reason nobody is solving this problem. Every part of our development workflow has been totally reimagined in the past few years. Startups that have taken a design-driven approach and introduced a 10x faster / simpler / cheaper product have dominated. There’s tons of innovation. Except in testing."

Rainforest is a Y Combinator company. As Stevens-Smith mentioned, Rainforest was built straight out of frustration with the manual QA process. Rainforest has started to see traction as QA has become a given for a website to enjoy success. Zapier uses Rainforest on every single deployment to ensure there is no gap in service.

The Rainforest API uses Amazon Mechanical Turk to make calls for people instead of machines. Developers create a series of yes/no questions referred to as steps as the parameters of the test. The API call pushes the steps to the human testing base. For more information, visit the API Docs.

QA has long remained the boring necessary evil that every developer must look in the eye before deployment. Rainforest looks to take the pain out of QA with simple, plain English tests and an API to scale tests across browsers. Before launching your next app, consider integrating Rainforest.

About the author:Eric Carter
Eric the founder of Dartsand and Corporate Counsel for a specialty technology distributor. He is a frequent contributor to technology media outlets and also serves as primary legal counsel for multiple startups in the Real Estate, Virtual Assistant, and Software Development Industries. Follow me on Google+